As the first step in a broad strategy to reduce risk and costs for the industry, Omgeo and DTCC began collaborating in 2013 to establish a user-governed global repository to store and communicate the "golden copy" of SSIs for all products and geographic locations. Omgeo ALERTSM, the industry's largest and most compliant web-based database for the maintenance and communication of SSIs, will serve as the foundation for this service. As part of the comprehensive industry-wide SSI utility, ALERT will coordinate and distribute SSIs between trade counterparties and support settlement activities across all markets and asset classes globally. The first phase of the initiative will be to enable global custodians and prime brokers to update and maintain accurate SSIs within ALERT.

With the addition of 430 investment managers and broker/dealers worldwide, the Omgeo Central Trade ManagerSM (Omgeo CTM) community grew by more than 33% during 2013. Omgeo CTM is the firm's strategic platform for the central matching of cross-border and domestic equity, fixed income, exchange-traded derivatives (futures and options) and contract-for-difference transactions. Today, more than 1,700 firms worldwide use Omgeo CTM as the result of expansion across geographies and asset classes, with marked growth in markets, including Australia and France. Also adding to its growth has been the successful completion of a multiyear migration of clients from Omgeo's legacy local trade confirmation service, Omgeo OASYS Global&SM.

Omgeo added new capabilities, including collateral optimization, to Omgeo ProtoColl® in 2013. The new capabilities are designed to help the industry more efficiently manage its existing asset inventory in light of emerging initial and variation margin collateral requirements imposed by the DoddFrank Act and European Market Infrastructure Regulation (EMIR). In addition, Omgeo announced partnerships in 2013 with TriOptima triResolve, a leading portfolio reconciliation solution, and AcadiaSoft MarginSphere, a margin confirmation service. The partnership links ProtoColl to both services, bringing greater efficiency to the collateral management process.

Omgeo delivered a new pricing strategy designed to reduce costs and overall risk in the financial markets by incentivizing industry best practices. The company is able to offer pricing change as a result of cost efficiencies gained from ongoing investments in infrastructure and technology. Omgeo has extended these efficiencies to its client community through targeted pricing across a number of services. These include pricing incentives for Same-Day Affirmation (SDA) via Omgeo CTM and OASYS-TradeMatchSM and incentives for standing settlement instruction data quality on Omgeo ALERT. Similar pricing adjustments made to Omgeo TradeSuite ID℠ in 2012 resulted in SDA incentive savings of approximately 20 to 25%.

SECURINGTODAY

Omgeo is helping its clients prepare for the move to a shorter, harmonized settlement cycle  T+2  across all European (EU) member states by January 2015. As a first step, Omgeo is working closely with its user community to ensure that its clients are sufficiently automated to meet the shorter settlement deadline by fully utilizing services from Omgeo, such as central matching through Omgeo CTM and standing settlement instruction enrichment via Omgeo ALERT.

SHAPINGTOMORROW

Omgeo has added new exchange-traded derivatives (ETD) functionality to its central matching platform, Omgeo CTM, to support ETD post-trade activities. With exchange-traded derivatives volumes expected to increase as more investment managers move from OTC derivatives to futures and listed options as a result of global regulatory mandates, there will be increased pressure to support this key asset class throughout the lifecycle of the trade. More than 40 market participants have already agreed to adopt this new functionality since its rollout.